Books Pick: Coke Plus

Howard Markel’s “An Anatomy of Addiction,” reviewed this week in the magazine, offers rich portraits of two historical figures, Sigmund Freud and the American surgeon William Halsted, and their shared addiction to cocaine. By the late nineteenth century, cocaine was prized as a topical anesthetic and considered a low-risk treatment for morphine addiction and alcoholism—“the wonder drug of modern medicine.” Both Freud and Halsted, Markel writes, had a “particular constellation of bold risk taking, emotional scar tissue, and psychic turmoil” that made them susceptible to drug addiction, and which makes their professional achievements despite that condition all the more remarkable. Cocaine not only captured the attention of both men, it launched their careers: they used it to experiment on patients and, as was often true with doctors of that generation, in the private laboratories of their own bodies.

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